Sunday, March 28, 2004

A collection of short stories by, you guessed it, H. P. Lovecraft. They are all very well written and were engaging to read, and I’m sure were revolutionary when they were first published, but each and every one left me wanting just a little bit more. There are those who probably find the horrifying more horrifying when it is undescribed and left to the imagination, but I would have liked to go a little deeper into the horror each time. The worlds Lovecraft creates are complex and true, and I’m sure the deeper horror was there in his mind when he wrote, but the worst of the worst never seems to make it onto the page.

Wise men told him his simple fancies were inane and childish, and even more absurd because their actors persist in fancying them full of meaning and purpose as the blind cosmos grinds aimlessly on from nothing to something and from something back to nothing again, neither heeding nor knowing the wishes or existence of the minds that flicker for a second now and then in the darkness.H. P. Lovecraft, "The Silver Key"

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.H. P. Lovecraft, "The Call of Cthulhu"